Lost in Varanasi

I traveled in India on August 2008, for twenty-three days. Having spent few days around New Delhi, I begun to move eastward. When I arrived in Varanasi, about in the middle of our trip, my partner was bedridden for several days by a heavy fever. I found myself alone in the narrow and muddy streets of the city, the monsoon breathing around me. Stranger, traveler, photographer.

Varanasi is a place that forces you to strip yourself of any frippery. Rationality ceases to be prudish soon, unable to understand and interpreting. The most ancient certainties, concerning life and death, are mixed with mud and ashes, and poured into the Ganges. Everything is possible, everything is different, nothing more is absolute. Each thing is a pervasive, elusive revelation. The fluctuating chaos of a millenarian movement, which finds in this place its ending point. Time becomes space.

Accompanying me in my meaningless wanderings, photography brings up the inability to square the mandala designed by gestures, rituals, faces and eyes. In each of the images here presented, I thought I recognized, in a sort of shining shadow, the glimmer of a Truth that my soul has absorbed, even without understanding it deeply.

about me

Born in italy in 1976
more or less at dinner time.
Currenly based in Rome.
Above a self-portrait taken in the toilet of a cinema.